Matching Tracksuits

I’ve been spending a little time in the evening delving back into the photos I’ve scanned. It’s frustrating: I have small images, and they don’t create a lot of data for Lightroom to manipulate. Still, I’ve got a workflow for them now, and I’m more and more pleased with the results.

Some fixes are easy; some are tedious.

Uncle Dinky (never once did I call him by anything other than the nickname he’d had for most of his life) looks a lot better with a little work. Had to correct some colors a bit, but not much. I focused on getting his face bright and clear.

I’m most pleased with the tricks I’ve learned for the old red photographs that are so ubiquitous.

Look at that tone curve for reds: everything is in the mid-ranges. No red in the shadows; no red in the highlights. The same is always true for blue and green. I’m not sure how that all combines to give a red tint to everything, but I’ve found a solution: recalibrate the tone curve for each color and voila! It’s a semi-decent picture. Unfortunately, though, each picture’s tone curve skew is different, so creating a preset to do the work with the click of a button isn’t an option. I have to correct each color of each photograph manually.

The moment the photographer presses down the shutter release and takes a picture is, at that instant, a beautiful moment worthy of remembering forever. That’s a lofty way of looking at it, to be sure, but there is some truth to that statement even regarding the most rudimentary, spur-of-the-moment snapshot. This was even more the case before the days of digital photography and vitrually-infinite storage. Each image actually cost money and eventually had to be stored. So I think we might have been a little more circumspect about taking photos, taken a little more care then.

Tonight, I began going through old photographs that Nana had saved. There are thousands of them, and I have looked at each one of them and put them in one of two pile: save or discard. The discard pile is at least twice as big as the save pile. From a practical standpoint, it has to be: I’m planning on scanning all the saved pictures. But even more so, the vast majority of the pictures are, despite the seeming worthiness to the photographer’s eye, utter crap. They fall into one of two categories: time has had its way with the photographs and they’re washed out, turned pink, darkened, or completely washed out. In short, there’s no picture there anymore. The other category has to do with subject matter and composition: it’s meaningless, or it’s something like the backs of two people standing talking at a car.

Friends’ troop had their graduation. I had the fun of photographing the event tonight.

One of the things I love about visiting Babcia is the ability to walk out ten minutes from the house to see things like this. Now that I’m back at our own computer, I’ll be going through photos and re-editing them in Lightroom. Prepare yourselves!

Not so much…